Defence Related reports, articles and Presentations
Resilience and Reality: Australia’s Strategic Challenges Podcast 29 Dec 2025 - hosted by the National Institute for Deterrence Studies
In a discussion with Dr Carl Rhodes and Dr Christine Leah, I discuss the sobering reality for Australia’s Defence posture. I conclude that the easiest way to undermine Australia isn’t through military force, it’s through vulnerabilities in infrastructure, cyber systems, foreign ownership of critical assets, and lack of sovereign shipping for fuel and supplies. Deterrence isn’t just about platforms; it’s about controlling the levers of survival. Energy security, supply chain sovereignty, and infrastructure resilience matter as much as submarines and fighter jets. We discuss what steps we could take to ensure true resilience in an era of strategic competition.
2025 ... Another Australian Defence Reorganisation?
Is Australia just "adrift in the South Pacific?"
Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles recently announced a major overhaul of Australia’s Defence Department, creating an independent Defence Delivery Agency (DDA) to fix procurement issues, merging three existing groups (CASG, GWEO, NSSG) into the Defence Delivery Group (DDG) from July 2026, and becoming fully independent in July 2027, aiming for better value and accountability for massive defence spending.
Will this reorganisation really work? What lessons have been learned from the multitude of reorganisations over the past two decades that did not achieve the outcomes sought. Sadly, it does not appear as if we have learnt much at all, given the ongoing challenges in building and running our Defence Force.
In 2024 our Institute published the essay Australia, a Complacent Nation … Adrift in the South Pacific? - link below. It preceded the 2024 National Defence Strategy. The essay will be updated following the release of the 2026 National Defence Strategy.
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Executive Summary of the 2024 essay:
Do you ever wonder what has happened to our National Security and Defence capabilities over the past decade, and whether we can have any confidence in the current direction espoused by both major political parties ? Is Australia, in fact, secure today, or is Australia a complacent nation adrift in the South Pacific?
Australia’s strategic situation is, in our view, more complex than depicted in the Defence Strategic Review. We are currently dealing with concurrent, and in some cases, existential, concerns. These include climate change and the urgent need to reduce emissions, rising global and regional security risks, a global pandemic with long-term societal and economic consequences, a global energy transformation in which we lag behind the developed world, and a global market model that has resulted in reduced resilience due to a lowest price, just-in-time philosophy. Increased levels of internal instability, societal unrest, and a lack of trust in government and institutions among our AUKUS partners raise concerns about the possibility of similar tendencies occurring in Australia.
In the essay we discuss what has occurred in the geopolitical context and in our country’s political system over the last two-plus decades in order to try to understand how we arrived at the fragile national security situation we have today.
With respect to a failure of leadership, the revolving door of Australian prime ministers in the twenty-first century was a national embarrassment ... six Prime Ministers in 15 years was the sad legacy of short-term-focused, self-interested, and, in some cases, egotistical politicians. Compounding this has been the parade of 38 Defence related Ministers over 23-years, each with a party-political agenda, and frequently with little real understanding of National Security or Defence. They collectively tasked a total nine Defence related White Papers, and nine Defence reform, restructure, and transformation programs. What could possibly go wrong? Well...a lot did!
Our major concern is that the analysis of our national security continues to be conducted through a somewhat narrow military platform lens and in the absence of a National Security Strategy based on a National Risk Assessment … what could possibly go wrong ... next?
The Defence Strategic Review 2023
The 2023 Defence Strategic Review …But where is the National Risk Assessment, the National Security Strategy, and the Plan?
Defence Related reports, articles and Presentations
Presentation to the 2022 Air and Space Symposium - National Resilience and Innovation in Australia
The 2022 Air and Space Power Conference explored resilient and innovative approaches to achieve national and regional advantage in air and space power. The conference provided an opportunity for the military and national security communities to explore different elements of national, industry, military and societal resilience, and to understand the resulting threats and emerging opportunities to air and space power’s ability to shape, deter, and respond.
Presentation to the 2018 RAAF Airpower Conference - Energy Security
There is an assumption that “business as usual” will provide for energy security in “peacetime.” However, this ignores the reality that we already operate in a contested space, and “business as usual” is not what it was a decade ago. We are already in conflict with our competitors.
INTEGRATED AIR & MISSILE DEFENCE 2017 REPORT
The Williams Foundation conducted an Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) study between Sep16 and Feb17
The aim of the study was to explore the challenges of building Australia’s IAMD capability and the implications for the Department of Defence’s integrated force design function. The study was focussed at the Program level of capability..
5TH GEN INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE ARTICLES
Integrated Information Architecture is a National Security Issue
Published in the Australian Defence Magazine November 2019
In our November 2018 ADM article we noted that the current stove-piped model of Defence networks creates bottlenecks for the passage of essential, time-critical information and also constrains the passage of that information to a number of limited bandwidth classified pathways. A national IME would also need to address such bottlenecks …
The “5th Generation Information Management Environment”
– An Australian Defence Force Enabler or a Roadblock?
Published in the Australian Defence Magazine, November 2018.
The issue faced by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) today is that existing communications and information networks were not “designed” as an integrated system and do not appear to be a good foundation upon which to build the 5th Generation Force the ADF is acquiring. The ADF will need an integrated communications architecture and network, one that is not purely defined by individual projects. There is a need for systems architecture; however, this is not a function that Defence can perform by itself.
THE 5TH GEN ADF / RAAF PLAN JERICHO
In April 2015 Centre for Military Studies and the Williams Foundation hosted a symposium on "Integrating Innovative Airpower" in Copenhagen.
